What if we drained the pacific?

I want to get one thing out of the way first:

According to my rough calculations, if an aircraft carrier sank and got stuck against the drain, the pressure would easily be enough to fold it up and suck it through. Cooool.

Just how far away is this portal? If we put it near the Earth, the ocean would just fall back down into the atmosphere. As it fell, it would heat up and turn to steam, which would condense and fall right back into the ocean as rain. The energy input into the atmosphere alone would also wreak all kinds of havoc with our climate, to say nothing of the huge clouds of high-altitude steam.

So lets put the ocean-dumping portal far away- say, on Mars. (In fact I vote we put it directly above the Curiosity rover; that way, it will finally have incontrovertible evidence of liquid water on Mar's surface.

What happens to the Earth?

Not much. It would actually take hundreds of thousands of years for the ocean to drain. Even though the opening is wider than a basketball court, and the water is forced through at incredible speeds, the oceans are huge. When you started, the water level would drop by less than a centimeter per day.

There wouldn't be even a cool whirlpool at the surface- the opening is too small and the ocean is too deep. (It's the same reason you don't get a whirlpool in the bathtub until the water is more than halfway drained.)

But let's suppose we speed up the draining by opening more drains.(Remember to clean the whale filter every few days), so the water level starts to drop more quickly.

It's pretty similar but there are a few small changes. Sri Lanka, New Guinea, Great Britain, Java and Borneo are now connected to their neighbors.

And after 2000 years of trying to hold back the sea, the Netherlands are finally high and dry. No longer living with the constant threat of a cataclysmic flood, they're free to turn their energies toward outward expansion. They immediately spread out and claim the newly exposed land.

This is because these bodies are no longer connected to the ocean. As the water level falls, some basins cut off from the drain in the Pacific. Depending on the details of the sea floor, the flow of water out of the basin might carve a deeper channel, allowing it to continue to flow out. But most of them will eventually become landlocked and stop draining.

Oceans basically have two life supporting roles. First, they absorb and distribute solar radiation. Without water, harsh rays from the sun would bake the equator while distributing almost no energy to the poles, especially in the winter. Fortunately for us, water does a great job of absorbing energy, and the oceans regulate temperatures around the Earth. Currents circulate warm tropical waters to the north and south and cold water back to the equator, distributing heat energy so that no place gets too hot for life to survive and warming colder areas. Second, the oceans feed the sees to the air to the clouds, across miles and back again to the sea or to fall on land.

When water is heated at the equator, it evaporates and becomes clouds. As warm air rises, it also draws in cooler air from underneath. This process stimulates more even heat distribution, turning places where it would otherwise be too cold to live into lush, balmy gardens. That's why there are places in Scotland, warmed by the Gulf Stream, where you can grow palm trees.

But let's get back to what would happen if the oceans have turned to dirt. We'd like to give ourselves a small window of suitability, so let's say the dirt is moist enough that it won't immediately turn the planet into an enormous dust storm.

The oceans are gone but we still have some water. Let's take stock. Ice caps, lakes and rivers (which now flow to vast expanses of soil) and underground water are still available. Added together, those sources total about 3.5 percent of our present water supply, the other 96.5 percent having disappeared with the oceans. That's not enough to get a decent worldwide water cycle going, even if we melted the ice caps. (About 68.7 percent of Earth's fresh water is frozen in glaciers, ice caps and permanent snow, mostly in Antarctica.) Without clouds forming over the ocean, rain would be incredibly rare, and the planet would become desert. We'd watch our lakes and water supplies dwindle a little more every year until nothing was left.